It would have been bad enough had you decided to replace the one category with two separate categories, one for American Men and one for American Women novelists, since that division would have suggested that the gender of the writer is the most important distinction (as opposed to, oh, genre or era) and since it would leave out genderqueer novelists completely.

But you didn’t even do that. The dudes are going to get the default category “American Novelists,” while women get shunted off into a cozy little ghetto, the easier to ignore, which is pretty much been the case for most of human history. Men are the normal, everyone else is the other. Hey, good news for sexist readers: this way, a person searching for American Novelists on wikipedia won’t accidentally end up reading a woman’s writing. No, no. Now that can only happen if the person is searching specifically for women novelists. What a relief.

But here’s the thing that confuses us. It’s not like you haven’t been called out for sexism before or anything. You’ve had a problem with this for a while, and despite your claims that you want to change the culture among the editors, you really haven’t done much about it. Instead, you do this. You once again diminish women.

And you’re doing this at a time when we’re more conscious than ever, thanks to groups like VIDA, of the huge disparities in attention that books by men receive in terms of reviews in big publications over books by women, as well as the disparities in space that men receive to write reviews as opposed to women reviewers. We’re talking about massive inequalities here, and you’re aiding and abetting that. As Amanda Filipacchi said in the piece linked above, “People who go to Wikipedia to get ideas for whom to hire, or honor, or read, and look at that list of “American Novelists” for inspiration, might not even notice that the first page of it includes far more men than women. They might simply use that list without thinking twice about it. It’s probably small, easily fixable things like this that make it harder and slower for women to gain equality in the literary world.”

So Wikipedia Editors who thought this was a good idea, do us a favor here. Even if there’s something in your brogrammer code that refuses to allow you to undo this, at least stay out of the way of the editors who are cleaning up the mess you made.

Amy Letter is the Rumpus Digital/Electronic/New Media Literature Editor.
Brian Spears is the Rumpus Poetry Editor.
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4 Responses to “Dear Wikipedia Editors,”

I feel the same issue is at play for non-white writers labeled “african american writer” or “asian-american writer.” As you guys pointed out, the catagories suggests one group is the norm and everybody else is an other. To a person of color, or women (take your pick) being ghetto-ized feels ridiculous and dated. I would prefer that non-progressive book stores, librarians and Wikipedia fully own their silly bulshit and just have categories called “American writers with vaginas,” “American writers with penises,” “Writers of different skin pigmentation.” Because that would be no less silly that using the labels they use.

It seems a lot of these changes are being made by female wiki editors in an attempt to call special attention to female authors. Though I believe their heart is in the right place, I hope they realize how destructive this is to the broader perception of gender equality.

Perhaps before addressing the wikipedia community, you should probably learn a bit about how things work. First of all, read this:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality, which are the community developed guidelines on how to categorize by ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexuality. There are currently over 8000 categories specifically for women – I would estimate that the bulk of them are not paired with categories for men (there are around 6000 just for men however). This is an explicit design – the category structure accepts this asymmetry.

Note that I personally don’t agree with the current setup, and I also agree it creates a “norming” issue, but please provide practical advice on how to get around it! For example, there are many categories for non-heterosexuals, like LGBT Writers, LGBT Musicians, etc. To avoid norming, would you want to create Heterosexual musicians? What’s *your* solution to avoid the norming issue?

You may also enjoy reading the discussion around the recently created category “American men novelists”, with many arguing to delete this category since male writing is not a topic worthy of study, for example.

That is the system that has been in place for a while and has been developed through community consensus.

The recent brouhaha was just because some editors weren’t really following the agreed upon guidelines, which in these cases require you to not diffuse ethnic/gender categories – so the guidelines in place already are as you’d like them to be, it seems.

You should also read about category diffusion, and while you’re at it, take a look at the library of congress and do some digging about how *they* categorize authors (hint: Do they have a separate sub-cat for women novelists?? yes.)

If you want to make a change, don’t blog about it, come to the page and join the conversation, and help make the guidance better. It’s actually quite difficult to categorize well, so your potshots are rather weak – I’d be much more impressed if you could come suggest how to categorize everyone (esp when it comes to ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality) in a way that recognizes certain communities/intersections currently subject of study, while not doing so in a way that brings forth accusations of sexism and racism. It’s really quite difficult.

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